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Climbing the Wall, Part 4

We mainly visited that stop on the silk road in order to see the impressive Jiayuguan Fort.

Before we went to the Fort, we had some breakfast get enough energy to start with.

That day we were in football mood, probably because of the quite successful German participancy of the confed cup?

The fort guards the pass between the snow-capped Qilian Shan peaks and the Hei Shan of the Mazong Shan range. Built in 1372, it was called the “impregnable defile under heaven”. Although the Chinese often controlled territory far beyond the jiayuguan area, this Fort was the last major stronghold of imperial China – the end if the “civilized world”, beyond which lay only desert demons and barbarian armies of Central Asia.

We also had some rest in the really hot sun and deserved some ice cream

In China we already came across many weird translations, so here I want to share one example:

The most fun part was actually, riding those electro scooters through the ancient buildings:

I’m not sure whether the Scoscooter rental shop regretted to rent them to us, since we were used to the speed of the German Autobahn and obviously speeded a little too much. We had one accident and also broke one engine. One of us had his hand and leg injured and the staff also wanted 200 RMB (30$) for the broken engine from us. We were able to negotiate it down, so we got out of the area with some scars and 100 RMB less. But it was definitely wort the joy!

The next stop was the Overhanging Great Wall, being constructed in 1539.

It was the second time for the the two other guys to climb the Great Wall and the fourth time for me. Quite impressive! This part was really nice and the view was super good!

We had great fun climbing it, but as soon as we climbed it, we saw there’s another part of the Great Wall more up high in the mountains, looking really beautiful to us.

So we decided to climb that part as well:

In the following picture you can see the part of the Great Wall that we climbed first:

Do you remember Allen and Xiao Liu? Our friends that we got to know in Zhangye when we went to the Matisi temple together. We’ll, they work in Jiayuguan as Rollercoaster constructors and we met them for a super delicious BBQ. It was an absolute fantastic evening!